Bread Movement

With graceful motion of the hands, paper-thin bread is made in Lebanon

Bread and anything that has to do with the subject is very important to me. I am making bread on a weekly basis for my family, not only because I think it tastes better but because the essential food of my children needs to be baked by their mother, I believe ... Their is a certain engergy that transcends into the dough making it nourishing both to the body and to the soul.

During the last Terra Madre, I met founder of the Bread Movement Nadezhda Savova. Bread Movement was founded in Bulgaria in 2009. It is associated with the Slow Food International Movement and Terra Madre Network.I highly suggest you visit the link provided above and read all about it. The great thing about all this is that Nadezhda will be visiting Lebanon in June. Bread and bread-making in Lebanon is indeed quintessential, we will have to celebrate its existence, somehow...Does anyone have any ideas to propose to Nadezhda? Ideas are welcomed. Let's open a Bread House in Lebanon.

I quote from the website:
"The movement inspires people from around the world to join and make the first step toward sustainable, responsible lifestyle: making one’s own bread, and making it collectively as a leisure entertainment! "

"Workshops with different religious groups and immigrant communities, as in Cape Town with Muslims, Catholics, Protestants, African animists, and atheists, showed the unifying and peace-building power, not in inter-religious “dialogue” but inter-religious “making” the most basic and universal human sustenance for life! Bread as a symbol and as a tactile experience also embraces spiritual and religious values, and communities within the BREAD Movement are encouraged to think how to inter-weave the community ecology with local spiritual practices, so sustainability would have strong roots in people’s hearts and minds as much as in their local soil."

The site goes on to say, Why BREAD?

I quote ...

• Bread is universally present and loved around the world (even rice and corn-based cultures have rice and corn breads), consumed by people without division of economic status, age, gender, ethnicity, religion, education,etc: therefore, bread is a universal experience and a universal language to unite and educate
• Can be made by anyone, from child to grandparent, and is at the same time the most entertaining cooking activity
• When people share food, they are very much likely to establish peace and cooperation
• Creating, not passively consuming, bread and art inspires the confidence that there are creative solutions to any problem, and that problems are not as grave as imagined
• Tactile and taste experiences (bread-making stimulates all five senses!) develop particular parts of the brain, as studied by psychologists, which makes one perceive the world differently and ask deeper, critical questions: “Where does food come from and why? How do I treat my body, and what other food – intellectual and spiritual – do I need for a meaningful life?”

 Their motto is " grain by grain, one bread at a time"

Because I have been photographing this subject for years in Lebanon, here is a glimpse as to what bread means to us as Lebanese, it's the common denominator in our diversified country ... 

photo Raymond Yazbeck

photo Raymond Yazbeck